The Other F-Word Page 3

  SUZANNE: Did you seriously just go there?

  FRANKIE: Yeah. I did.

  SUZANNE: You’re as much his mother as I am. You know that.

  FRANKIE: Am I?

  SUZANNE: (Silence)

  FRANKIE: Am I really?

  SUZANNE: Come on, Frankie. This isn’t about your ego. It’s his choice. You agreed to this when we decided to use a donor. You knew this day would come.

  FRANKIE: So—what? You’re saying we should just go ahead and let our fifteen-year-old get in touch with a complete stranger on the off chance that this guy has some genetic mutation? A mutation that scientists in this one study theorize might be connected to food allergies?

  SUZANNE: Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

  * * *

  Now, in Milo’s room, they were both looking at him. Frankie from the swivel chair, Suzanne from the edge of his bed. Milo looked at the ceiling, avoiding eye contact. Frankie didn’t know what Suzanne and Milo knew. Frankie had no idea, but when Milo was thirteen Suzanne had told him about the Donor Progeny Project. She’d explained how the site worked. She’d said that he was officially a member. The login name and password—whenever Milo was ready to use them—would be his and his alone. Suzanne had handed Milo an envelope. She’d asked him to please not tell Frankie until he had actually decided to start searching. In the meanwhile, Suzanne had said, there would be no reason to cause Frankie undue pain. Which was bullshit, Milo thought now. Cause Frankie pain? What about Milo’s pain? What about Milo spending his entire life without a father? Fifteen years without a man to talk to? No one to show him how to tie a tie, or how to shave, or how to ask a girl out?

  Milo had kept the envelope in his sock drawer for a while, until he’d realized that Frankie sometimes rearranged things when she put away his laundry. So he’d folded the envelope into thirds. He’d stuck it in his wallet. He’d carried it around with him for over a year, and he never opened it. Until last night, at JJ’s party, after he’d drunk an indeterminable amount of vodka.

  Milo peeled his eyes away from the ceiling and looked at his moms. He didn’t know what to say. Or rather, he did know what to say, but he couldn’t say it out loud. Deep down, Milo knew why he’d gotten on the DPP website last night. Did he really expect to find a cure for his allergies? No. How would it help him to know if #9677 carried this aberrant gene? Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he was just looking for an excuse to start looking.

  There. He’d admitted it. He wanted to find his father. Was Frankie capable of hearing this? No chance. Suzanne would be okay, but not Frankie.

  Milo’s head was starting to ache. His mouth was a desert. All he wanted was water.

  “I need a drink,” he rasped.

  “Don’t we all,” Frankie said drily.

  HOLLIS

  Fate. Karma. Destiny. It was all crap, and yet Hollis’s mother was convinced that the email from Milo Robinson-Clark to PjBarnesie_373@hotmail.com was Pam’s work. Pam, reaching out from the grave—just as she had once reached out in life—to bring Hollis and her half brother together.

  This is what Hollis discovered on New Year’s morning, when she shuffled into the kitchen and found her mother waiting for her. “Happy New Year,” Leigh said. She was smiling, which was weird enough. She was fully dressed. And, weirder still, she had made some slimy-looking egg dish.

  The sight of pans on the stove was so rare it actually spooked Hollis. Her mother never cooked. Pam had been a chef, so when she was alive she did all the cooking. Pam had owned a restaurant in Maple Grove called Figs. That’s where she and Leigh had met. After Pam died, Hollis’s mother stopped appreciating food. She made sure Hollis was fed, but meals were usually takeout, and breakfast was always cereal.

  Hollis stared at the disgusting egg dish. “What the…” she muttered.

  “Pam loves eggs Benedict.”

  Hollis shot her mother a look. Did she even realize she’d used the present tense? It pissed Hollis off, but she didn’t have the energy to fight. She didn’t have the stomach for eggs, either. Between last night’s moo shu shrimp and the bombshell from Milo Robinson-Clark, Hollis felt vaguely nauseous. Her mouth still tasted like garlic.

  “Sit,” Leigh said, sweeping an arm through the air like a game-show host. “Eat.”

  Hollis sat tentatively on the edge of a chair. There was something wrong with her mother; that much was clear. Maybe she’d been drinking. Hollis looked around for evidence, but found none. Maybe she’d finally started taking her happy pills. The thought of this made Hollis livid. But why? For years she’d been begging her mother to take the depression medication prescribed by her shrink—not the grief counselor Hollis once saw, but some other woman. “I’m not depressed,” Leigh said, every time Hollis’s Uncle Drew, a psychiatrist in North Carolina, brought up the subject of medication. “I’m grieving.”

  Well, she certainly wasn’t grieving now. She was digging into her eggs Benedict with gusto. She was smiling across the table.

  Hollis scowled.

  “Why the face?” her mother said.

  “Why are you acting so weird?”

  “I’m not acting weird.”

  “Yes,” Hollis said. “You are.”

  “Look under your plate.”

  “Why?”

  “Just humor me.”

  Hollis felt her eyes roll upward—the clichéd teenager. Well, forgive her, but she was exhausted, and what was her mother doing, exactly?

  “Go on,” Leigh said.

  Hollis sighed and lifted her plate.

  There were three photos. Not just the one Hollis remembered—of her and Milo on the seesaw with their matching juice mustaches—but two others. Group shots with Hollis, Milo, and the four moms. Leigh looked so young and so pretty, Hollis barely recognized her. Her face was tan. Her hair was streaked with blond. She was smiling up at Hollis, who was perched on Pam’s shoulders and grinning wildly at Milo, who was held aloft by one of his mothers. Hollis wasn’t sure which—Suzanne or Frankie.

  “Huh,” Hollis said.

  “It’s your family.”

  “What?”

  “Those people, right there. They’re your family. That’s what Pam has been trying to tell us.”

  Here we go, Hollis thought. Her mother was forever looking for signs that Pam was still with them, imbuing even the most random occurrence with meaning.

  “The email,” her mother said now. “It was a sign.”

  Of course it was.

  “It came to Pam’s Hotmail account for a reason.”

  Right.

  “Pam wants you and Milo to find each other again.”

  “Mom,” Hollis said with as much restraint as she could muster, “I don’t know how to break this to you, so I’m just going to say it … Pam’s dead.”

  “In the physical sense, yes.”

  “In every sense.”

  “Love never dies.”

  “And unicorns are real.”

  There was no point in using sarcasm on Hollis’s mother. It rolled right off her.

  “Pam arranged that visit, you know.” Leigh gestured to the photographs. “She organized the whole thing.”

  “I know.”

  “It was important to her.”

  “I know.”

  “We wanted to give you a brother or sister. We wanted to use the same donor and have Pam carry the baby. But then she got sick.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  If Hollis had a dollar for every time she’d heard this story she could buy a boat and sail away from the kitchen. Find an island somewhere. She wouldn’t need much, just some food and her favorite books and—

  “He had hazel eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Your donor. We picked him because he had hazel eyes, like Pam. And he was smart. And tall.”

  Hollis gave her mother a blank stare. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I wanted to give you some information.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought
you might like to know something about him.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Hollis snapped. “I don’t want to know one thing about that mother-effer.”

  Mother-effer. The irony of the word was not lost on Hollis. She would laugh if she weren’t so mad. Her body was pulsing with anger. She would chuck her eggs Benedict across the room if the sight of them quivering on the plate didn’t make her stomach churn.

  Leigh’s eyes widened. Blue eyes, not hazel.

  “Sorry,” Hollis muttered.

  “No. This is good. I want to know how you feel.”

  “He has five kids, you know.” Hollis stabbed a piece of toast with her fork. “That jackass.”

  “I know.”

  Hollis looked up. “What?”

  “I spoke to Suzanne. She filled me in.”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about that email yesterday. I couldn’t stop thinking that if I’d closed Pammy’s account Milo would never have found us. Everything happens for a reason, Hollis. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t an accident. He found us because of Pam.”

  She sounded excited. Hollis couldn’t remember the last time her mother had been so excited. She hated to piss on her mother’s parade, but this was the twenty-first century. Milo could have found them any number of ways. Google. Facebook. Whitepages.com. But her mother was on a roll about Pam. And when her mother was on a roll about Pam, nothing Hollis said could stop her.

  “So I started thinking, what would Pam want me to do now? And I thought, she’d want me to call Suzanne and Frankie. So I did. First thing this morning. And they invited us to Brooklyn. And then I thought, what would Pam want me to do with this invitation? She’d want me to book us a flight—”

  Okay, wait. “What?”

  “She’d want me to book us a flight. So I did.”

  Hollis stared at her mother. “Are you serious?”

  “We leave at two o’clock. We fly back Sunday afternoon.”

  Here her mother was, smiling. Practically clapping her hands. How could she book them a flight when they hadn’t been on an airplane since before Pam died? They never went anywhere. Not even to North Carolina to see Uncle Drew and his kids. But now—all of a sudden—they were flying to Brooklyn to see three people they barely knew? Now Hollis’s mother wanted her to have a family?

  “Well?” Leigh was waiting.

  WTF? That was Hollis’s response. She was tired, nauseous, disgusted by the sight of Pam’s cat, who had just leaped onto her mother’s lap and was proceeding to lick herself another fur ball.

  “What about Yvette?” Hollis said.

  “She’ll come with us. She’ll be my carry-on.”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “Please don’t bring the cat.”

  “Okay.”

  Okay? Hollis stared across the table. Her mother loved that cat like the second coming of Pam. “Seriously?”

  “This is your trip,” her mother said. “You make the call.”

  MILO

  You’d have to be donor-conceived to get it. Or adopted, Milo supposed. Or switched at birth or left on the doorstep of an orphanage. But how many of those people actually got the chance to drive to the airport and pick up their half sister? Not many, he would bet. It was surreal.

  Hollis and her mother were due to arrive any minute, but Milo’s moms were not exactly rolling out the welcome mat. They were still arguing. This morning had been fine. The phone call with Hollis’s mom had been fine. But as soon as Suzanne hung up and broke the news to Frankie about the Donor Progeny Project, they’d been at each other. All the way to JFK in the cab, it was Frankie accusing Suzanne of betrayal and Suzanne accusing Frankie of self-absorption.

  FRANKIE: You lied to me, Suzanne.

  SUZANNE: I didn’t lie to you, Frankie. I just didn’t tell you.

  FRANKIE: That’s a lie of omission.

  SUZANNE: It wasn’t a lie of omission. The information was for Milo. It didn’t apply to you. Not everything applies to you.

  FRANKIE: You think the possibility of our son finding his sperm donor and genetic half siblings doesn’t apply to me?

  SUZANNE: I didn’t say that. I said the information didn’t apply to you at the time I gave it to Milo. It was his choice whether or not to use it. And now that he’s chosen to use it, I’m telling you.

  FRANKIE: Well, thank you for keeping me in the loop like I’m actually a member of this family.

  SUZANNE: Are you serious?

  Here they were at the baggage claim, still going strong. Milo did his best to mediate. “Drop it,” he said. And, “Point made.” “What’s done is done.” “We all have the same information now.” “We’re in this together.” “You’re my family.” And finally, “Shut up. I think that’s them.”

  Frankie got in one last dig: “Great time for houseguests.”

  “Leigh lost her partner,” Suzanne hissed. “Hollis lost her mom. This is what people do.”

  “I just don’t see the urgency. Couldn’t we have done this another time?”

  “Super idea.” Suzanne smiled and waved across the room. “I’ll just send them home.”

  There, coming down the escalator, were a girl and her mother. The girl was uneasy. You could see it in her eyebrows, which were thick and dark and scrunched together, and in the way she clutched her messenger bag to her chest like a security blanket. Her hair, on the other hand, looked thrilled to be here. It sprang out from under her black skullcap in all directions. Thick, dark, wild.

  Milo knew that hair. He saw it every morning when he looked in the mirror.

  “Suzanne?” the mother said, stepping off the escalator first. She was thin and pale, with a limp ponytail and tired eyes. “Frankie?”

  “Leigh!”

  Milo watched as his moms, one after the other, hugged Hollis’s mom.

  “We’re so sorry about Pam,” Suzanne said.

  “So sorry,” Frankie said, squeezing Leigh’s hand.

  “Thank you.” Hollis’s mom nodded. Milo could see fine lines around her eyes, grooves on either side of her mouth. “There’s no place Pammy would rather be than here.”

  Milo saw Hollis smirk.

  “Mi,” Suzanne said gently, “you remember Leigh.”

  “Of course.” Milo stepped forward. He stuck out his hand and they shook. In his peripheral vision, he saw Hollis smirk again. Or maybe it wasn’t a new smirk; maybe she’d never stopped.

  “Hollis,” Suzanne said, holding out both arms like Maria von Trapp. “Welcome, sweetheart.”

  “Welcome!” Frankie echoed joyously.

  His moms were putting on a show, as if they hadn’t spent all afternoon fighting. As if this weren’t the most loaded family reunion ever.

  “Thanks,” Hollis said. She didn’t move in for a hug. She just stood there at the bottom of the escalator, clutching her messenger bag.

  “Hey,” Milo said, lifting his chin in greeting.

  “Hey.” Hollis opened her mouth to yawn, revealing her pierced tongue. One of those silver barbell thingies. It matched the two in her ear.

  Hollis’s look—the skullcap, the ripped jeans, the piercings—wasn’t strange for New York, but Milo wondered how it translated in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Was Hollis a fringe kid? A rebel? A freak?

  “They look alike,” Hollis’s mom murmured to no one in particular, but Suzanne answered, “They certainly do.”

  “The miracle of DNA,” Frankie said heartily. Then, placing a hand on Leigh’s arm, “Do you have any baggage?”

  Hollis snorted. “We have baggage, all right.”

  “Hollis.” Her mother looked pained, like Hollis was giving her a headache.

  “What? It’s a double entendre.”

  “We packed light,” Leigh said, patting the black roller suitcase beside her. “We’re all set.”

  “Great.” Frankie’s smile was so wide and bright Milo almost couldn’t look at it.

  “I’ll get us a cab,” Suzanne said. “O
kay, hon?”

  “Okay, hon.”

  Milo watched his mothers exchange a look that said, We are not finished fighting, but as long as we have guests we will pretend, for decorum’s sake, that we are on our honeymoon.

  HOLLIS

  Hollis walked into her half brother’s room for the first time ever, feeling strange and gawky because A) she’d never been in a high-school guy’s room before, and B) this wasn’t just any high-school guy; this was her own flesh and blood. Only, it wasn’t like she and Milo had grown up together. They were basically strangers, and yet here she was in his most personal space, his inner sanctum, looking at all his stuff. Beanbag chair. Juggling sticks. Lava lamp. Pile of dirty clothes shoved in a corner. Framed photos. Here was Milo in a black robe and mortarboard, sandwiched between his moms. Middle-school graduation, Hollis guessed.

  She leaned in closer. The three of them looked nothing alike. Suzanne was so tall and angular, like Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter if Professor McGonagall had ever smiled. Suzanne looked more like a benevolent headmistress than a software engineer, although that’s what she was, apparently. Milo didn’t resemble Suzanne in any obvious way. Maybe they had the same eyes, but Hollis couldn’t be sure. They definitely didn’t have the same nose. And Frankie was … Professor Umbridge, short and thick. No. That wasn’t a fair comparison. Frankie had way cooler hair than Professor Umbridge. A red buzz cut with these awesome spikes in front. And Hollis could bet she wouldn’t be caught dead in an Umbridge dress. Frankie was a jeans girl, like Hollis. Frankie was built like a wrestler. She looked like she could kick some serious ass. Although how ass kicking would come in handy for a social worker, Hollis didn’t know. Maybe Frankie dropkicked deadbeat dads until they paid their alimony.

  “Eighth-grade graduation,” Milo said, suddenly appearing on Hollis’s right. His sorry-looking mutt appeared, too, gazing up at Hollis with watery eyes.

  “Oh.” She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Hollis, this is Pete. Pete, Hollis.”

  Hollis looked at the dog. The dog looked at Hollis.

  Hollis looked at her watch. It had been twenty minutes since she’d arrived at Milo’s house, or “brownstone” as he called it—which must be Brooklyn code for “small and cramped.” First, Frankie had insisted on snapping a photo of Hollis and Leigh and Milo and Suzanne all scrunched together on a couch. Then, Suzanne had insisted that the three moms have tea while Milo showed Hollis his room. Well, she’d seen his room. And now the conversation had run dry, and Milo’s dog was staring at her in an unnerving way, and there was nowhere to escape to, so she was just going to have to find something in this room to focus on so she didn’t completely freak out.